Tolkien Gleanings #219
* J.D. Vance is likely to be the next U.S. Vice-President by November, barring further assassination attempts. He tells the enquiring media… “A lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien”. See also the new article “The Political Vision of The Lord of the Rings”, posted at the Gerald R. Ford Leadership Forum. This appears to be intended as a brief backgrounder, for those in the American political class who are now curious about Tolkien.
* “Death and the Soul in Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, a recording of a conference paper given by Stratford Caldecott in 2013, but which has only now surfaced online (via his family).
* In the latest ANQ journal, “Two Norse Literary Analogues of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beacons of Gondor” ($ paywall). The first page is free.
* Now on Archive.org, a scan of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine #45 (Fall/Autumn 1999). This has an interview with Guy Gavriel Kay, who helped Christopher Tolkien edit The Silmarillion.
* A poetry and plaques walking-tour in Oxford…
“We stood outside the former rooms of C.S. Lewis and read the feverishly atheistic poems he’d written there as an undergraduate, long before he became a noted voice for Anglicanism. We read wayfaring poems by Tolkien, playfully claiming him for Univ’s history (our [University College Oxford] College Archivist notes that early in his career, Tolkien was a peripatetic tutor and taught the occasional Univ student; Merton’s Fellows were graciously amused to hear that we included Tolkien in our tour and several have already signed up for Univ’s 2024 poetry tour in Michaelmas term.)”
* An online Signum University course potentially starting September 2024, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Text, Translation, Film”. It will only run if enough people sign up for it.
* And finally, TheOneRing.net has a new Exclusive Interview with Sir Richard Taylor of Weta Workshop. For the movie’s Minas Tirith…
“we literally piled a whole lot of cardboard boxes together, sprayed them with urethane foam, carved them back, and then started building onto them. Never could we think that this miniature would end up going on to be exhibited in a museum, having a life well beyond the movie. If we had known, we would have built it a little better. But we were building them so cheap, so fast, that I really was of the view that the only thing that mattered was that they just needed to hold up for the filming.”